


too many able fires

by nextgreatadventure



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: 3x09 spoilers, F/F, if you watch the show consider yourself warned about the content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 18:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8633680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nextgreatadventure/pseuds/nextgreatadventure
Summary: The sound of the faucet running from the bathroom wakes her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> so i read that interview regarding the kiss where everyone was like “oh it MIGHT not be as sexual as everyone thinks” so naturally i was like, BUT WHAT IF IT WAS? what if...it was outrageously sexual?
> 
> in summary: what follows is a giant fiery ball of incoherent feelings, which takes place during 3x09 and then sort of diverges from canon.

 

 

\---

 

 

The sound of the faucet running from the bathroom wakes her.

“How long have I been out?” Annalise asks from the doorway, rubbing her eyes.

Bonnie reaches to dry her hands with a towel, glances into the mirror at Annalise. “Not long. An hour, maybe.”

“You been out somewhere?” is Annalise’s next question, her eyes on Bonnie’s heels.

Bonnie’s jaw moves in a small, strange way. “No,” she says finally. “I was about to go see Frank.”

Annalise is not sober yet, but she’s no longer drunk. She takes a few steps into the bathroom, hovering. “Why? You want to screw him again?” She rests a hand on Bonnie’s lower back like a punctuation. Her eyes are cold but her voice is soft, and lacks its usual poison (she just sounds sad, defeated - once again, everything she thought she could control has been ripped unceremoniously from her, and she is reeling from the familiar emptiness).

Bonnie braces her arms, leans into the sink in front of her. She doesn’t acknowledge the hand on her back, but she doesn’t ignore it, either. “I was going to try to talk to him. I was going to try to fix this for us.”

There’s a long silence in which they both do nothing but stare at the faucet, but then Annalise moves closer still. She steps into and then past any perceived personal space, until Bonnie’s hipbones bump into the counter and she can feel Annalise’s whole body pressing against her back, their legs brushing together.

(Bonnie has a flash of restless hands roaming her face, of the scent of expensive vodka on warm, soft lips. “It didn’t mean anything,” she’d told Annalise about that night in Coalport with Frank, because Bonnie had not been able to bear the look on Annalise’s face any longer.)

“You know what I miss?” Annalise says suddenly, as though the conversation had warranted it, as though she knew exactly where Bonnie’s mind had gone, “more than alcohol, more than life before all the murder and deceit?” Annalise pauses here, and then adds, long vowels and a low voice meant for her specific brand of caustic taunting, “More than Sam?”

Bonnie blinks up at Annalise in the mirror. “What?”

Annalise drifts a hand to Bonnie’s hip, holding her still, while the fingers of her other wind into Bonnie’s hair and tug gently until Bonnie acquiesces, until her neck is exposed. Annalise’s lips hover just over the pulsepoint, a surge of breath on Bonnie’s skin. “I miss those nights where I’d be undressing for bed, and I’d find your lipstick marks on my thighs.”

Bonnie sucks in a quiet inhale, presses more weight into her hands, short nails digging into the tile. Her wrists are beginning to ache.

“Don’t you miss that?” Annalise whispers, and slowly, she kisses the side of Bonnie’s neck. “Come on. You know how good I can make you feel.” Her hand tightens on Bonnie’s waist, starts to roam up, down, across, like the body beneath Bonnie’s clothing is hers to claim (even though it has been years since this was true).

Bonnie’s world starts to spin. It takes a lot of strength to reach out and grab it, to steady it, to steady herself. Annalise is desperate, Bonnie knows this. She knows that Annalise is scared, tired, abandoned, defanged. Annalise is sinking her claws in, reacting selfishly to the space, the untruths, that Bonnie has put between them (they both know that Annalise is the only one allowed to put any space or lies between them). Annalise is reacting to betrayal, to jealousy and loneliness the only way she knows how, the way she always does: by using her body and a shared past and carefully chosen words to provoke, to crumble, to seduce.

Annalise believes that she lost Bonnie to Sam, once (and still, she can barely admit that she has no one but herself to blame for this), but she’ll be damned if she loses her to Frank, too. Bonnie is all that Annalise has left.

(And despite Bonnie’s better judgement, the seduction is working - whenever has it not?)

Bonnie says nothing, does nothing, but after a few moments she leans back into Annalise, closing her eyes. When Annalise starts to tug Bonnie’s blouse free from her pants so that she can slip her hands inside, Bonnie lets her. Annalise has always been bold in her tactility. She winds her arms around Bonnie, touches her bare stomach and fingers her ribs, twists her hands beneath Bonnie’s bra to palm her breasts, sucks on the spot below Bonnie’s ear that they both remember so well.

(God, it’s working.)

 

 

 

 

 

There was a night over a decade ago when Annalise found Bonnie in the bathroom after her fifth date with a guy from her Legal Methods class. It was ten or eleven at night, but it wasn't uncommon for the Keatings to have students at their house until past midnight, and Bonnie had nowhere else to go, nowhere else she could be alone with her thoughts (and of course, she wasn’t just another one of their students).

“Hey there,” Annalise had said softly, knocking on the door frame. “Can I come in?”

“Sorry,” Bonnie had wiped at her cheeks quickly. “I thought I was being quiet.”

Annalise stepped inside, slid the door shut behind her. It had been nearly a year since they'd lost the baby, and Annalise had already draped distance like neverending winter around her. She was generally impatient and reactionary these days, fighting with Sam, riding her students with outrageous expectations. She was winning cases and making enemies and drinking too much every single night. Nobody commented, nobody stopped her - how could they? - so they kept on watching the distance grow.

(But every once in awhile, even then, there were moments like that night, where Annalise’s voice would take on the kindness that Bonnie remembered from before.) 

“You were quiet,” Annalise had assured her. “I just thought, you'd been in here nearly an hour, and I didn't ever hear the sink go or the toilet flush.”

Bonnie had laughed then, wetly, unsure what else to do. “Sorry,” she said again.

Annalise sat down next to Bonnie on the tile floor, groaned as she stretched out her legs. “Don't ever get old,” she told Bonnie, and then, “and you really need to learn to stop apologizing for every damn thing.”

“Sorry,” Bonnie murmured sheepishly, staring at her hands. 

“So, you want to tell me the guy’s name who hurt you so I can have him taken out?”

The corner of Bonnie’s mouth twitched upwards, and she couldn't express it at the time, but later she would realize that the feeling that had spiked through her at those words was love - the kind that wrapped itself insidiously around her bones and truly became a part of her, the kind that would later make her do awful, terrible, unthinkable things. Annalise was the first and only grown woman who had ever cared about her. Annalise was ruthless, confident, brilliant, and carried with her the sort of beauty and wrath that could devastate entire landscapes. Bonnie idolized her.

“His name is Derrick,” Bonnie had confessed to her. “But he didn't do anything. It's me.”

Annalise mulled this over. “Want to tell me what happened?”

Bonnie breathed in and out, thinking. This was surely something Sam would want to talk about during their next therapy session, and she wondered for half a moment if that meant she shouldn't tell Annalise, but then quickly discarded the thought.

“I don't know,” Bonnie said, beginning to rub at her neck (a stubborn anxiety reflex). “We were talking, taking turns asking each other questions. It was nice. But then he said, ‘Bonnie, tell me something most people don't know about you.’”

Annalise rose a brow.

“I know he didn’t mean anything by it, he was just trying to get to know me better, but all I could think of was...was…”

“Your whole life,” Annalise finished for her.

Bonnie swallowed, still looking carefully into her hands. “I couldn't even think of a lie to tell him. I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't have scared him away for good. I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't have scared _anyone_ away for good.”

“Bonnie,” Annalise chided gently.

“How am I ever supposed to get close to anyone, Annalise?”

Annalise had looked at her then, and Bonnie would remember that moment for years, would replay it over and over in her mind just to make sure she didn’t forget, to make sure it was real.

“Bonnie,” Annalise had said to her, “you have so much love inside of you. You are a miracle. You are a survivor. You will find people who know you, and understand you, and love all of you.” She grasped Bonnie’s chin and turned it toward her, because Bonnie had looked away. “Do you hear me?”

Bonnie lifted her dark eyes to meet Annalise’s, and Annalise was looking at her in some kind of way, the way Sam sometimes looked at her - and Bonnie’s whole body had gone weak. She didn’t know why, after all this time, it was Annalise that she finally chose to believe, but she had, and it was just another of the many ways in which Annalise had saved her (perhaps because it had been Annalise all along who knew her, and understood her, and loved all of her).

Bonnie nodded, and Annalise had drifted the edge of her thumbnail below Bonnie’s bottom lip before she pulled away. The butterflies had taken a long time to settle.

(It was only in that moment, with her sense of worthiness temporarily bolstered, with Annalise’s hand on her face, that Bonnie allowed herself to admit that yes, she wanted Annalise: wanted her so badly in so many impossible, amorphous ways, ways she couldn't even comprehend let alone describe. Bonnie knew that if Annalise had asked her for anything at all in that moment, she would have given it all too willingly.)

 

 

 

 

 

“I want to hear you say it.” 

Annalise’s fingers are spreading through her like a gasoline fire, and Bonnie has wanted this at least once in every single day that’s passed since the first time. 

(She still thinks of Frank, briefly, even with Annalise’s fingers inside of her, Annalise’s low voice in her ear, Annalise’s body covering hers. Frank, she loves. Frank she trusts, and wants, and needs. But it is Annalise who consumes her.)

“Say it,” Annalise hisses again. Her fingers curl harder, desperate and demanding, and Bonnie feels it like something hot and sudden spilling across her body.

“I’m yours,” Bonnie gasps, her breath slipping from her lungs, a long chain untethered. “Annalise. I belong to you.”

Annalise slows her rhythm imperceptibly, and then switches hands, pressing wet fingers to Bonnie’s abdomen, holding her close, while the others resume their stroking, coaxing, teasing. “Only me?” Annalise asks, and her voice wraps itself like ribbons around Bonnie’s heart and tugs unbearably.

Bonnie tilts her head back, rocks her hips back, trusting Annalise with the weight of her small body, with the weight of everything between them. Bonnie’s cheek is hot when it presses up against Annalise’s, and Bonnie reaches for Annalise’s free hand, clumsily twines their fingers together. “It’s always been only you.”

 

 

 

 

 

They usually moved to opposite sides of the office, because Annalise did not really like to touch or be touched afterward. The most she would do (and Bonnie always, always hoped that she would) was pull her fingers through Bonnie’s hair as Bonnie rested her forehead against the inside of Annalise’s thigh, waiting to catch her breath. Sometimes, Annalise would scratch gently at Bonnie’s scalp with her nails and sometimes, Bonnie would wish for impossible things, painful things, things that stung her eyes with tears (which she would then make sure to wipe away before Annalise saw them).

Inevitably, those hands would push her away (not unkindly, but no longer gentle) and Bonnie would understand that it was time to leave, or to put a room’s worth of distance between them.

And then they would get back to work.

 

 

 

 

 

Annalise makes Bonnie come twice, right in front of the bathroom mirror, one right after the other, and she’s intent on continuing (as if Bonnie will be marked hers a little more with each and every orgasm given) - but Bonnie finds the strength to pull away, to twist Annalise around with urgency.

“Please, Annalise,” she breathes, and her mouth is already on Annalise’s neck, dragging, tasting. In her nostalgic delirium, she has temporarily forgotten all of the lines that Annalise has crossed, the unending debris of the ruined things in their lives that cannot be made new. “Can I--?”

Bonnie is a little desperate herself (it has been so long since she was allowed this), and when Annalise nods, she drops straight to her knees. Annalise leans back into the counter’s ledge and watches Bonnie hike her dress up, watches her slide the underwear down, smoothing her soft pale hands across dark hips and thighs. Watches her surge forward, mouth opening, tongue blossoming.

She is ravenous.

 

When it’s over, Annalise has to pull Bonnie up from the floor because she will not stop. She wipes at her wet lips, chest heaving. Her knees ache but she looks at Annalise with a bright question in her eyes.

“You don’t want me to keep going?”

Bonnie is breathless but Annalise kisses her anyway, her tongue filling Bonnie’s mouth.

 

(In the dim moments and minutes afterward, Annalise begins to fall apart again. She wraps her arms around Bonnie like a child seeking to be picked up and held, or a person slowly drowning. Bonnie cradles Annalise’s head, presses her lips to Annalise’s temple, and thinks about how she wasn't supposed to let any of this happen again. Wonders how, beneath her desire to placate and please and protect, she actually, truly feels about what just happened - everything that has happened.

Bonnie has never been very good at denying Annalise anything at all, her own feelings be damned.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You been spreading your legs for Sam, too?” Annalise had asked her out of the blue one night, so many years ago that Bonnie can no longer remember when. It was just the two of them alone in the empty house, thunder cracking outside and Annalise’s fingers still rocking inside of her.

“What?” Bonnie was stunned, and she had clutched at Annalise’s shoulders and said, in a strangled voice, “god, no, Annalise. No. Never. Why would you think that?”

Annalise didn’t say why, didn't say anything at all, but she hadn’t let Bonnie touch her that night. She’d told her to get her things and go home. Annalise saw only what she wanted to see.

 

(The cracks had only gotten bigger after that, and wider, so immense and splintered that Bonnie had cut her hands every time she tried to touch Annalise. Bonnie would have done anything for Annalise, any filthy, humiliating, degrading thing, but the truth didn’t matter because it had never been about Sam alone - it had been about all of it, the way everyone in that house had tried to bend themselves into unhealthy shapes for each other, the way they tried to use those shapes to fill voids they had no business filling. The way they put too much faith in one another, when faith alone could not bear the unfathomable weight of so many broken lives.)

 

 

 

 

 

Sam had warned her, once, but by then it had been too late (and even if it hadn’t, Bonnie wasn't sure she’d have heeded the warning). Bonnie thought maybe Sam had seen how Annalise had been treating her, even in public, and how despite everything, Bonnie still followed her around like a beaten animal. This was back when Bonnie still believed that Sam was a good man, that they were a decent couple who had had terrible things happen to them, but that they were trying their best to piece together a family with what they had left (even though Sam was sleeping with multiple twenty-two year old students at the time, and Bonnie had been sleeping with his wife for months).

“She didn’t used to be this way, you know that,” Sam had told Bonnie, needlessly. “She isn’t to blame. She’s...a hurricane of hurt. She’s in so much pain, has been her whole life, and because of that, she...just…”

He had trailed off, and rubbed his hands down his face. Somehow, it had turned into Bonnie comforting him instead. Often, especially in the years to come, it turned into Bonnie comforting him instead. Sometimes Bonnie thought that the only reason she wasn't sleeping with Sam instead was a simple matter of chance, of roulette, but deep down Bonnie knew that this was one of the most devious lies she had ever told herself.

“She destroys,” Bonnie murmured. She had put her hand onto Sam’s.

Sam’s thumb rubbed across her skin. “Don’t blame her, Bon. Don’t think that you have anything to do with it.”

Inside, Bonnie had been screaming. Her face was a cool blank slate. “I don’t,” she'd said, another lie that would fester inside of her for decades.

 

 

 

 

 

“I’ll never forgive you, you know,” Bonnie says later. “For what you did to Frank.”

“You don’t have to,” Annalise tells her. “There are plenty of things I haven't forgiven you for.”

Bonnie ignores this comment. “You’ll never forgive him either, will you?”

Annalise looks into Bonnie’s eyes for a long time. “No,” she says finally. “I can’t. You know that.”

Bonnie blinks down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap. “Okay,” she says simply, but Bonnie still feels as if her heart has divided itself into two, three, four, a hundred pieces, feels as if those pieces have scattered to the floor and have disappeared into the cracks of all the ways she has tried and tried and tried (and still, she cannot fix them - her cobbled, dismembered family).

Annalise reaches to tuck a wayward lock of blonde behind Bonnie’s ear. Brushes the back of her index finger along the woman’s jaw line. “Okay then.”

After a few moments of silence, Annalise spreads her fingers, cups Bonnie’s cheek. “Tell me again,” she says. _Make me believe it_ , she does not say.

Bonnie closes her eyes, leans into Annalise’s hand obediently. She tilts her chin down, presses her lips to Annalise’s palm and keeps them there. What surprises her is not the words she says to Annalise then - which are memorized, repeated inside her head daily - but the way her voice cracks, as if with the force of trying to convince them both that it is still true. 

“I'm yours,” she whispers into Annalise’s skin. “I’m yours.”

 

 

 

 

 

\--


End file.
